The Higher Immorality
excerpts from the book
The Power Elite
by C.Wright Mills
Oxford Press, 1956
The higher immorality can neither be narrowed to the political
sphere nor understood as primarily a matter of corrupt men in
fundamentally sound institutions. Political corruption is one
aspect of a more general immorality; the level of moral sensibility
that now prevails is not merely a matter of corrupt men. The higher
immorality is a systematic feature of the American elite; its
general acceptance is an essential feature of the mass society.
Of course, there may be corrupt men in sound institutions,
but when institutions are corrupting, many of the men who live
and work in them are necessarily corrupted. In the corporate era,
economic relations become impersonal-and the executive feels less
personal responsibility. Within the corporate worlds of business,
war-making and politics, the private conscience is attenuated-and
the higher immorality is institutionalized. It is not merely a
question of a corrupt administration in corporation, army, or
state; it is a feature of the corporate rich, as a capitalist
stratum, deeply intertwined with the politics of the military
state.
***
There is still one old American value that has not markedly
declined: the value of money and of the things money can buy-these,
even in inflated times, seem as solid and enduring as stainless
steel. 'I've been rich and I've been poor,' Sophie Tucker has
said, 'and believe me, rich is best.' As many other values are
weakened, the question for Americans becomes not Is there anything
that money, used with intelligence, will not buy?' but, 'How many
of the things that money will not buy are valued and desired more
than what money will buy?' Money is the one unambiguous criterion
of success, and such success is still the sovereign American value.
Whenever the standards of the moneyed life prevail, the man
with money, no matter how he got it, will eventually be respected.
A million dollars, it is said, covers a multitude of sins. It
is not only that men want money; it is that their very standards
are pecuniary. In a society in which the money-maker has had no
serious rival for repute and honor, the word 'practical' comes
to mean useful for private gain, and 'common sense,' the sense
to get ahead financially. The pursuit of the moneyed life is the
commanding value, in relation to which the influence of other
values has declined, so men easily become morally ruthless in
the pursuit of easy money and fast estate-building.
A great deal of corruption is simply a part of the old effort
to get rich and then to become richer. But today the context in
which the old drive must operate has changed. When both economic
and political institutions were small and scattered-as in the
simpler models of classical economics and Jeffersonian democracy-no
man had it in his power to bestow or to receive great favors.
But when political institutions and economic opportunities are
at once concentrated and linked, then public office can be used
for private gain.
Governmental agencies contain no more of the higher immorality
than do business corporations. Political men can grant financial
favors only when there are economic men ready and willing to take
them. And economic men can seek political favors only when there
are political agents who can bestow such favors. The publicity
spotlight, of course, shines brighter upon the transactions of
the men in government, for which there is good reason. Expectations
being higher, publics are more easily disappointed by public officials.
Businessmen are supposed to be out for themselves, and if they
successfully skate on legally thin ice, Americans generally honor
them for having gotten away with it. But in a civilization so
thoroughly business-penetrated as America, the rules of business
are carried over into government-especially when so many businessmen
have gone into government. How many executives would really fight
for a law requiring a careful and public accounting of all executive
contracts and 'expense accounts'? High income taxes have resulted
in a network of collusion between big firm and higher employee.
There are many ingenious ways to cheat the spirit of the tax laws,
as we have seen, and the standards of consumption of many high-priced
men are determined more by complicated expense accounts than by
simple take-home pay. Like prohibition, the laws of income taxes
and the regulations of wartime exist without the support of firm
business convention. It is merely illegal to cheat them, but it
is smart to get away with it. Laws without supporting moral conventions
invite crime, but much more importantly, they spur the growth
of an expedient, amoral attitude.
A society that is in its higher circles and on its middle
levels widely believed to be a network of smart rackets does not
produce men with an inner moral sense; a society that is merely
expedient does not produce men of conscience. A society that narrows
the meaning of 'success' to the big money and in its terms condemns
failure as the chief vice, raising money to the plane of absolute
value, will produce the sharp operator and the shady deal. Blessed
are the cynical, for only they have what it takes to succeed.
***
It is the proud claim of the higher circles in America that
their members are entirely self-made. That is their self-image
and their well-publicized myth. Popular proof of this is based
on anecdotes its scholarly proof is supposed to rest upon statistical
rituals whereby it is shown that varying proportions of the men
at the top are sons of men of lower rank. We have already seen
the proportions of given elite circles composed of the men who
have risen. But what is more important than the proportions of
the sons of wage workers among these higher circles is the criteria
of admission to them, and the question of who applies these criteria.
We cannot from upward mobility infer higher merit. Even if the
rough figures that now generally hold were reversed, and 90 per
cent of the elite were sons of wage workers-but the criteria of
co-optation by the elite remained what they now are-we could not
from that mobility necessarily infer merit. Only if the criteria
of the top positions were meritorious, and only if they were self-applied,
as in a purely entrepreneurial manner, could we smuggle merit
into such statistics-from any statistics-of mobility. The idea
that the self-made man is somehow 'good' and that the family-made
man is not good makes moral sense only when the career is independent,
when one is on one's own as an entrepreneur. It would also make
sense in a strict bureaucracy where examinations control advancement.
It makes little sense in the system of corporate co-optation.
There is, in psychological fact, no such thing as a self-made
man. No man makes himself, least of all the members of the American
elite. In a world of corporate hierarchies, men are selected by
those above them in the hierarchy in accordance with whatever
criteria they use. In connection with the corporations of America,
we have seen the current criteria. Men shape themselves to fit
them, and are thus made by the criteria, the social premiums that
prevail. If there is no such thing as a self-made man, there is
such a thing as a self-used man, and there are many such men among
the American elite.
Under such conditions of success, there is no virtue in starting
out poor and becoming rich. Only where the ways of becoming rich
are such as to require virtue or to lead to virtue does personal
enrichment imply virtue. In a system of co-optation from above,
whether you began rich or poor seems less relevant in revealing
what kind of man you are when you have arrived than in revealing
the principles of those in charge of selecting the ones who succeed.
All this is sensed by enough people below the higher circles
to lead to cynical views of the lack of connection between merit
and mobility, between virtue and success. It is a sense of the
immorality of accomplishment, and it is revealed in the prevalence
of such views as: 'it's all just another racket,' and 'it's not
what you know but who you know.' Considerable numbers of people
now accept the immorality of accomplishment as a going fact
***
Moral distrust of the American elite-as well as the fact of
organized irresponsibility-rests upon the higher immorality, but
also upon vague feelings about the higher ignorance. Once upon
a time in the United States, men of affairs were also men of sensibility:
to a considerable extent the elite of power and the elite of culture
coincided, and where they did not coincide they often overlapped
as circles. Within the compass of a knowledgeable and effective
public, knowledge and power were in effective touch; and more
than that, this public decided much that was decided.
'Nothing is more revealing,' James Reston has written, 'than
to read the debate in the House of Representatives in the Eighteen
Thirties on Greece's fight with Turkey for independence and the
Greek-Turkish debate in the Congress in 1947. The first is dignified
and eloquent, the argument marching from principle through illustration
to conclusion; the second is a dreary garble of debating points,
full of irrelevancies and bad history. George Washington in 1783
relaxed with Voltaire's 'letters' and Locke's 'On Human Understanding';
Eisenhower read cowboy tales and detective stories. For such men
as now typically arrive in the higher political, economic and
military circles, the briefing and the memorandum seem to have
pretty well replaced not only the serious book, but the newspaper
as well. Given the immorality of accomplishment, this is perhaps
as it must be, but what is somewhat disconcerting about it is
that they are below the level on which they might feel a little
bit ashamed of the uncultivated style of their relaxation and
of their mental fare, and that no self-cultivated public is in
a position by its reactions to educate them to such uneasiness.
By the middle of the twentieth century, the American elite
have become an entirely different breed of men from those who
could on any reasonable grounds be considered a cultural elite,
or even for that matter cultivated men of sensibility. Knowledge
and power are not truly united inside the ruling circles; and
when men of knowledge do come in contact with the circles of powerful
men, they come not as peers but as hired men. The elite of power,
wealth, and celebrity do not have even a passing acquaintance
with the elite of culture, knowledge and sensibility; they are
not in touch with them-although the ostentatious fringes of the
two worlds sometimes overlap in the world of the celebrity.
Most men are encouraged to assume that, in general, the most
powerful and the wealthiest are also the most knowledgeable or,
as they might say, 'the smartest.' Such ideas are propped up by
many little slogans about those who 'teach because they can't
do,' and about 'if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?' But
all that such wisecracks mean is that those who use them assume
that power and wealth are sovereign values for all men and especially
for men 'who are smart.' They assume also that knowledge always
pays off in such ways, or surely ought to, and that the test of
genuine knowledge is just such pay-offs. The powerful and the
wealthy must be the men of most knowledge, otherwise how could
they be where they are? But to say that those who succeed to power
must be 'smart,' is to say that power is knowledge. To say that
those who succeed to wealth must be smart, is to say that wealth
is knowledge.
The prevalence of such assumptions does reveal something that
is true: that ordinary men, even today, are prone to explain and
to justify power and wealth in terms of knowledge or ability.
Such assumptions also reveal something of what has happened to
the kind of experience that knowledge has come to be. Knowledge
is t no longer widely felt as an ideal; it is seen as an instrument.
In a society of power and wealth, knowledge is valued as an instrument
of power and wealth, and also, of course, as an ornament in conversation.
***
The American elite is not composed of representative men whose
conduct and character constitute models for American imitation
and aspiration. There is no set of men with whom members of the
mass public can rightfully and gladly identify. In this fundamental
sense, America is indeed without leaders. Yet such is the nature
of the mass public's morally cynical and politically unspecified
distrust that it is readily drained off without real political
effect. That this is so, after the men and events of the last
thirty years, is further proof of the extreme difficulty of finding
and of using in America today the political means of sanity for
morally sane objectives.
America - a conservative country without any conservative
ideology-appears now before the world a naked and arbitrary power,
as, in the name of realism, its men of decision enforce their
often crackpot definitions upon world reality. The second-rate
mind is in command of the ponderously spoken platitude. In the
liberal rhetoric, vagueness, and in the conservative mood, irrationality,
are raised to principle. Public relations and the official secret,
the trivializing campaign and the terrible fact clumsily accomplished,
are replacing the reasoned debate of political ideas in the privately
incorporated economy, the military ascendancy, and the political
vacuum of modern America.
The men of the higher circles are not representative men;
their high position is not a result of moral virtue; their fabulous
success is not firmly connected with meritorious ability. Those
who sit in the seats of the high and the mighty are selected and
formed by the means of power, the sources of wealth, the mechanics
of celebrity, which prevail in their society. They are not men
selected and formed by a civil service that is linked with the
world of knowledge and sensibility. They are not men shaped by
nationally responsible parties that debate openly and clearly
the issues this nation now so unintelligently confronts. They
are not men held in responsible check by a plurality of voluntary
associations which connect debating publics with the pinnacles
of decision. Commanders of power unequaled in human history, they
have succeeded within the American system of organized irresponsibility.
Power
Elite